Lance Armstrong has played down his chances of riding next year's Tour de France by announcing that he will wait until early May before deciding whether to bid for a record seventh consecutive Tour title.

The Texan began his build-up to the 2005 season recently with a training camp in his home city of Austin, during which he told the daily Austin American-Statesman that the decision over the Tour will be left until after he has raced the spring one-day Classics.

"Everything is clear in my head, I'm relaxed and I feel better than I have in December in other years," said Armstrong, who added that he intends to continue racing for another two years.

"Last year I was really very worried about everything that was being said. No one had beaten the record before [five Tour victories] and sometimes you end up believing the stupid things people say."

An initial decision over Armstrong's spring campaign will be taken at the end of January after his Discovery Channel team's training camp at Solvang, California. The Texan has confirmed that he will race the Tour of Flanders one-day Classic in early April and he will decide on the Tour when he returns to Texas for a break at the end of the month.

Making his mind up so late would leave Armstrong with only eight weeks to prepare for the Tour, which starts on the first weekend of July. That in turn suggests that he is at best ambivalent about riding the French race.

One potential distraction for the Texan could come with the possible publication in 2005 of a US edition of the unauthorised and controversial biography LA Confidential, published this year in French and the subject of two court cases over its suggestion through circumstantial evidence that Armstrong may have used banned substances, which he strenuously denied.

"We are in advanced negotiations with an American publisher and, if the book is published in the States, there will be a considerable amount of new material in it," said one of the book's co-authors, the French writer Pierre Ballester.